Various products can provide management layers that customer workloads can use in setting up configurations for computing, storage or the network, programming products or providing a hyper converged infrastructure, or a combination thereof. The management layers can include more than one layer. For example, FIG. 1 depicts a block diagram of a computer system 100, according to one embodiment. The computer system 100 includes an upper management layer 110, a lower management layer 120, and a layer 130 for configuring computing, storage or network (also referred to herein as “compute/storage/network configuration layer”), according to one embodiment. The upper management layer is referred to as being “south bound” with respect to the customer workload, the lower management layer is also “south bound” with respect to the upper management layer, and the compute/storage/network configuration layer is “south bound” with respect to the lower management layer. Therefore, the upper management layer, the lower management layer and the compute/storage/network configuration layer are referred to as “south bound software.”
Examples of an upper management layer are vRealize, EVO:RAIL, and EVO:RACK. An example of a lower management layer is a virtualized network platform, such as NSX® manager. Examples of hyper-converged infrastructure appliances and virtualized network platform products that can be programmed using south bound software are NSX®, virtual storage area network (vSAN), EVO:RAIL and EVO:RACK.